Summary

One of Legacy’s defining features is the incredible diversity in its metagame. Some decks look to apply pressure early, some look to lock the opponent out of the game, and some look to combo the opponent out as early as possible. The deck we’re featuring today is Dredge, which takes advantage of graveyard synergies to kill the opponent as quickly as possible.

As the name would suggest, this deck relies heavily on the Dredge mechanic, as it’s the easiest (and cheapest!) way of turning over your library. The Dredge cards in this deck are Golgari Grave-Troll (Dredge 6), Golgari Thug (Dredge 4), and Stinkweed Imp (Dredge 5). This deck will very frequently choose to replace drawing for turn with a Dredge, and these cards get particularly powerful with draw 2 cards, as the second draw has the option of being replaced with a Dredge, and can be replaced with any Dredge card that was turned over during the first draw replacement.

As for graveyard synergies outside of the Dredge mechanic, this deck plays several cards that rely on the graveyard to function. Narcomoeba is a pretty unexciting 1/1 flyer, but it acts as a free creature when milled over, helping this deck cast cards like Cabal Therapy while triggering Bridge from Below. Speaking of Bridge from Below, the enchantment is only useful in the graveyard, and it helps this deck take advantage of the sheer number of cards that have entered the graveyard. As more Bridges enter the graveyard, each Cabal Therapy flashback or Ichorid sacrifice becomes more impactful, flooding the board with Zombie tokens.

To help this deck hit its terminal velocity, a couple of impactful draw spells are played. Faithless Looting is already a powerful card on its own, but in this deck it shines, as it has two draws to be replaced by Dredging, and puts those Dredge cards back into the graveyard through discard. Breakthrough is perhaps the most high variance card in this deck, as it offers 4 Dredges for a mere 1 mana, but being forced to discard your entire hand can be less than ideal at times and it’s possible that Breakthrough could run out of fuel on its third or fourth draw.